You can hedge against any distro breaking by using a volume manager which allows snapshots of the root volume, or even better, creates these snapshots automatically before a distro upgrade. Both LVM and Btrfs can do this. I use LVM because I love boring tech.
> zcat /var/log/pacman.log.1.gz-2018010214.backup | head
[2009-02-23 18:14] installed filesystem (2009.01-1)
You can hedge against any distro breaking by using a volume manager which allows snapshots of the root volume, or even better, creates these snapshots automatically before a distro upgrade. Both LVM and Btrfs can do this. I use LVM because I love boring tech.